Rebel Yells?

Posted On 20 Sep 2017 / 0 Comment

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The recent protests over the removal of Confederate war statues in Charlottesville, Virginia, and other places has forced a lot of us in “the South” to seriously consider what place, if any, the monuments to the Confederacy should occupy in Southern culture. A quick fact check on the history of such statuary reveals that most of it was erected during the racist “Jim Crow” days. The most recent study of Confederate statues and monuments nationwide was published last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center. There were huge spikes in Confederate monument construction twice in the the 20th century: in the early 1900s, and then again in the 1950s and ‘60s. Both were times of extreme racial tension…

…“Most of the people involved in erecting the monuments were not necessarily erecting a monument to the past,” said Jane Dailey, an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago. “But were, rather, erecting them toward a white supremacist future.”….

…I didn’t grow up in Chattanooga, but I’ve lived here since I was 18. “Southern culture,” with its rebel flags and assorted other Confederate memorabilia, were never a part of my youth. We would make sporadic visits here during my childhood, usually punctuated by a trip to Krystal and a few other sights my dad remembered from his childhood. I grew up as an Air Force brat, part of a military force that was integrated well before the rest of the country… particularly the South…

…While I was at UT-Chattanooga, I got a job as a sports writer for the old Chattanooga Times. As part of this job, I often covered high school basketball at Brainerd High School, whose nickname was then “the Rebels.” (BHS later did a complete 180-degree turn on its nickname, switching to “the Panthers.”) It was surreal to see a court filled with black athletes, with half of them being the Rebels…

…The other day I saw an old pickup truck driving around with a piece of PVC pipe mounted vertically near the tailgate. Attached to this impromptu flagpole was… you guessed it… a rebel flag. This happened in a part of town where there are a significant number of black folks. The flag waver never slowed down or got out of his vehicle. Of course he didn’t. He imagined his flag waving as some sort of bold gesture, but it just came off as cowardly and ignorant. I saw the same truck about a week later with a University of Tennessee flag mounted on the pole. Go figure…

…Statues glorifying “heroes of the Confederacy” and rebel flags have existed since… well, at least since the 1950s and ‘60s. White supremacists have been cloaking such hateful symbology under a white robe of racial hatred for ages. With the emergence of new waves of white supremacists, it feels like the country has taken a giant step backwards in terms of racial prejudice…

…I realize that a lot of white Southerners grew up cherishing their Civil War history and the symbology behind it. But here’s the thing: despite all of their protests to the contrary, the Civil War was largely about slavery… not “state’s rights.” The right that the Confederates most wanted to preserve was the right to own other people. The agrarian Southern economy of that time was dependent on low (or no) cost labor. Slaves filled that role perfectly for the white plantation owners…

…Every monument to a Confederate war hero and every rebel flag is a slap in the face for the descendants of those Civil War slaves. Is it worth it to cause such pain just because some want to imagine a world where the Confederacy defeated the Union? No, it’s not. The Union victory preserved the United States and worshipping symbols of a failed cause is an exercise in hatred… and futility…